If you’re a company with a great product or service, marketing is critical to your business growth – both online and off. In fact, creating great marketing can be the difference between booming sales and flailing sales.

But great marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum or the confines of a boardroom. Great marketing is created when organizations takes risks. When they’re creative. When they’re obsessed with their customers.

My guest on today’s episode of the Grow My Revenue Business Cast is marketing and branding expert Ann Handley. Ann is the Chief Content Officer for MarketingProfs, an online education resource for modern marketers, and the author of the Wall Street Journal best-seller Everybody Writes.

Today, we cover the common mistakes businesses make when coming up with their marketing strategies, why ‘going viral’ is not recommended, and how developing a 'pathological empathy' for your customers is the number one thing that will move the needle in your marketing. I know you're going to love this talk, and you're going to learn a ton on today's edition of Grow My Revenue!

Listen to this episode and discover:

· The common mistakes companies make when developing marketing content.

· Why innovation and creativity are the foundation of great marketing.

· Why ‘going viral’ should never be a company’s aim.

· How Ann defines great marketing.

· Why developing ‘pathological empathy’ for your customer is vital.

· What companies can do to create rich, meaningful marketing messages that resonate.

· And so much more!

Episode Overview

As an expert and self-described marketing geek, Ann Handley understands the value of marketing in a way most business leaders don’t. While most follow cookie-cutter approaches to marketing, Ann champions an approach centered on innovation and creativity.

“The willingness to take some risks in your marketing I think is also key,” Ann says. “And inherent in that is really knowing who your audience is, know who you’re selling to as opposed to selling to everybody.”

That's why she encourages business owners and marketers to be “obsessed with their customers,” or what she calls ‘pathological empathy.’

“It’s next-level empathy,” she says. “All the companies I talk to that are actually using marketing to drive business are obsessed with their customers.”

Today you'll learn:

· What marketing really is.

· How templates and cookie-cutter approaches fail

· Why it’s vital to know your audience.

· How to create marketing that resonates.

· The company that wowed Ann with its genius marketing message.

On this edition of Grow My Revenue, you'll hear Ann’s take on how, in many ways, marketing has changed over the years and how, in many ways, it’s remained the same.

Also on today's show, Ann shares an embarrassing moment from MarketingProf’s 2016 B2B Marketing Forum in Boston, now in its 11th year. Tune in for all of that and more on today's Grow My Revenue with Ann Handley.

For full show notes and other resources, please visit: http://www.ianaltman.com/podcast/ann-handley/